Sometimes you just want to kick yourself!

I’ve had a very Raspberry Pi week, as I’ve had a work experience student with me at work, and one of the things that he was working on was looking at projects we could use as activities for a Raspberry Jam workshop. This is an “after Pi Wars” ambition for me – to launch a regular Raspberry Jam in Sheffield. Sam’s an experienced Raspberry Pi user, having put together a Pi-controlled 3D-printed hand. (I actually met him a few months ago at the Manchester Raspberry Jam.) Anyway, he did some great work on trawling through the resources on the raspberrypi.org website and picking out projects that he thinks would be fun for the not-quite-novices that might turn up.

But what’s that got to do with Pi Wars? Well, not much. Except that it meant I had another one of my pis out during the week, to act as the workhorse for these projects. And when I came home on the weekend, I just kept using it… but got really frustrated because (I thought) someone had been messing about and swapping SD cards around in my pis – it didn’t have the right code on it! I grumped about it for quite some time until I realised that I should be using the pi in the black pibow for Glitterator work!

Anyway, in amongst the grumping I managed to get the headers soldered on to my ToF sensors, and a “porcupine” (from Brian Corteil – essentially a connector for I2C devices) to chain them all on my I2C port. I didn’t get to test them out, partly because I left the bulk of my jumper leads at work on Friday 🙄 Still, it’s all ready to go! And then we can test the straight line speed test and maze code.

Angus meanwhile has been busy working on our gun. He’s come up with a lot of variations in design over the past few weeks, but never actually got to the point of connecting them up to a motor and the robot chassis at the same time. I stressed how important it was to do this, and he came up trumps today. And then we got to talk about the importance of accuracy – if you fire 5 shots from the same position, they should hit pretty well the same spot. Well, we’re not quite there yet, but not doing too badly, and with half term this week, hopefully he’ll set up a nice test rig and refine it.